In a mechanical sense of looking at things things actually touch though - i.e. the distance of the objects' surfaces pretty much goes to zero. The delivered information which people usually don't realize (at least that's my experience) is that such a "touching" won't happen on a sub-atomic level but the interactions happen on a distance...
That's a huge conceptional difference imo - in the one case things interact in some "mechanical" way i.e. the actual masses interact while in the other case all the interaction isn't really done by the involved particles but rather some effects, fields and whatever else there gets "spawned" by the particles is responsible for the interactions. That's quite some leap forward for someone explaining everything with billiard...
